Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!

Now, that brings us back to Glick's piece. The issue is not just the progressive left's campaign for the destruction if Israel, or that Stephen Walt was able to get an "Israel Lobby" conference going at Harvard. It's that our very institutions of cultural transmission have become so irreversibly corrupted that its frankly not safe for the education of people of decency, faith, and values. And I quote from the essay:

... today's crop of corrupt intellectuals of the Walt and Mearshimer variety with all their allies in academia and the media and the blogosphere and politics are seeking to delegitimize Israel - the collective Jew -- intellectually. Like the work of the eugenics champions of the late 19th and early 20th century, their work will provide Muslim Jew haters with the political leeway to murder Jews on a scale they could never have dreamed possible. Hence you'll never find a so-called "anti-Zionist" like Walt lose sleep over the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, but rather over the prospect of Israel preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

And this brings me to the second point. I read the CAMERA alert on my Iphone as I was feeding my newborn son. I looked out the window at Jerusalem and all I could feel was thankful to be living in the independent, free Jewish state of Israel. I am thankful that these pseudo intellectuals no longer can determine the future of my people, as they could in the 1930s. I am thankful that my children will in all likelihood not study in US universities but in Israeli ones that are not as demented as their American counterparts.

And here's a couple of disturbing thoughts for all the parents in the US who are about to put themselves in the poor house to pay for their children's university education.

The embrace of the cause of Israel's destruction by so many celebrity professors today is part and parcel of the destruction of the US higher education system.

At the Harvard conference, not a drop of truth will be spoken by any of the eminent Jew hating participants. Students who attend will be presented with lies dripping with moralistic gobbledygook and be told that they are enlightened for embracing this sewage.

The absence of truth from academic discourses is not limited to discussion of Israel. Rather, the ability of professors like Walt and his pals to prosper with their lies is a function of the general deterioration and corruption of academic institutions.

This general decline and indeed failure was highlighted last week by Prof. Peter Berkowitz in an article he published in the Wall Street Journal about Yale's totalitarian system of "informal justice" that allows the university to effectively destroy young male students' future by blackening their reputations on the basis of unsubstantiated and even anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct. The policies in place deny young male Yalies due process and enable witch hunts.

In his conclusion Berkowitz wrote that the abandonment of even the semblance of due process for male students on campuses is in line with the general deterioration or even disappearance of educational standards. As he put it:

At its best, university education has deteriorated into little more than random forays into the sciences, social sciences and humanities. But traditionally, and for good reason in a democracy, liberal education at its heart involved instruction in the principles of freedom.

If Yale and other institutions across the country were fulfilling their promise to educate students, then their faculties would teach that riding roughshod over due process shows ignorance of or contempt for the rule of law. Professors would be teaching that the presumption of innocence is rooted in a commitment to treating individuals as ends in themselves and not as a means to advancing some social goal or another, even if that goal is given the name of equality or justice. And students would be learning that our established and legitimate justice system does not presume guilt, because to do so is to fail to appreciate the limits of human knowledge and the propensity of those who wield power to abuse it.

Let's not forget that this is the same Yale University that saw fit to close its interdisciplinary center for the study of anti-Semitism last year because YIISA had the unmitigated gall to highlight contemporary "progressive" Jew hatred and its unwashed cousin Islamic Jew hatred.

CAMERA has launched an email campaign to try to fight Harvard's descent into Jew hating insanity. I think that it is good for what it's worth. But I have no expectations from that institution. The madness that has taken control of America's elite educational institutions is a threat to the US because it is robbing a generation of young people of the ability to think freely and critically about the world.

For me, the message is clear enough, as a Jew, a Jewish mother and a person who clings to my freedom, guns and religion, my job is to do everything I can to ensure that Israel remains strong and gets stronger so that today's corrupted elites can't touch us.

Recall my post a week ago, "Why Progressivism Should Scare the **** Out of You." I continue to deal with this kind of corruption at my college. It's not just "elite educational institutions." It's higher education and K-12 as well. Teachers and administrators are educated by the elite, the educational curriculum is designed by the elite, and faculty are held accountable based on the ideas and institutions created and enforced by the elite. Progressivism has metastasized deeply inside the institutions. I have learned this because I'm on the inside. I see how it's the normal course of events for the major agents of the educational bureaucracy to push socialism and the obliteration of traditional culture. I did not understand this years ago. My dissertation built on some of the theories of Stephen Walt, theories of alliance formation and the balance of power. Indeed, at first I didn't even understand the implications of Walt and Mersheimer's "The Israel Lobby." It's taken a while, but seriously, just look at the roster of participants at that conference. That is not an academic gathering. It's a political gathering to further organize for the elimination of the Jewish state. Being disguised as an academic conference and sponsored at the world's most prestigious university makes it all the more insidious. But these things fly under the radar and they work to pick away at the moral foundations of society, infecting the young and idealistic with ideologies that they might not fully comprehend in their hopes for a better world. But the world will not be a better place should the exterminationists win the day. And that's why I keep fighting for what's right. I would leave academe if I could, if I was financially able. But I'll be working on making that a possibility as soon as I can.